![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldAlan Weisman's impressive new book did The World Without Us, as Salon said it would, restore my sense of awe at the sheer durability of the natural world. Beginning from the intruiging starting point of the sudden disappearance of the world's human population, Weisman systematically examines the different artifacts of human civilization and concludes that while certain remnants of technological civilization would survive--certain industrial chemicals and plastics aren't likely to decompose for hundreds of thousands of years, well-suited introduced species will adapt to their new environment, garbage dumps will contain large numbers of durable artifacts for some time, and, of course the ongoing human-caused mass extinction will continue a bit longer as radioisotopes decay, urban/industrial areas burn, and climates change--material civilization would start disappearing quickly. Curiously enough, intact bronze sculptures may outlast everything else, enduring for tens of millions of year owing to the protection provided by their oxidated patina.
Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy wondered whether products of genetic engineering might last, perhaps to be discovered by Intelligent Design advocates in humanity's successor species. The odds seem to be against that. Organisms produced by modern genetic engineering are just as vulnerable to the winnowing pressures of natural selection as organisms produced by traditional breeding, since the traits selected for by humans are traits which don't appear in nature for a reason--organisms genetically engineered to spend valuable energy to produce insulin or silk are going to be at a disadvantage in the wild compared to organisms which don't produce human-used goods. Even human-created gene sequences, as a comment left by one Ben M. suggests, won't be very visible.
All said, I find nature's ease in recycling humanity's relics a bit depressing. Yes, it's very nice to know that complex life will handily outlast us, at least for another 1.1 billion years, after which point a heating sun is 10% brighter than it is today will make the Earth's oceans start to evaporate into water vapour. Still, the idea that millions of years hence nothing identifiable will be left of my species but piles of civilization's waste and fossil records of a sadly depleted biosphere is depressing. Is a net positive legacy really too much to hope for?
Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy wondered whether products of genetic engineering might last, perhaps to be discovered by Intelligent Design advocates in humanity's successor species. The odds seem to be against that. Organisms produced by modern genetic engineering are just as vulnerable to the winnowing pressures of natural selection as organisms produced by traditional breeding, since the traits selected for by humans are traits which don't appear in nature for a reason--organisms genetically engineered to spend valuable energy to produce insulin or silk are going to be at a disadvantage in the wild compared to organisms which don't produce human-used goods. Even human-created gene sequences, as a comment left by one Ben M. suggests, won't be very visible.
IDers claim to see protein structures that simply look funny. They look at the flagellum and say, "whoa, there are, like, twenty pieces"; they look at the centrosome and say, "whoa, it looks sort of like a jet engine". Humans may be designing our own organisms, but we are absolutely not designing custom proteins with irreducible mechanical arrangements. GMO proteins look and behave just like natural proteins -- they’re the same blobby enzyme-y things with pokey active sites and inscrutable folds. For the most part, they’re developed, not by a Designer sitting around fitting parts together, but by mutation and selection--artificial, forced, or targeted mutation (sometimes!) and selection in a petri dish (usually!). I’m willing to bet that the "Round-Up Ready" gene produces some surface protein whose structure and modus operandi were not known until after it was found to cause Round-Up resistance. A future scientist looking at the structure of this protein would conclude, at best, "This gene evolved in a species which was exposed to thus-and-such a toxin; it evolved very rapidly, so must have been under intense selection." He will not be able to say, "This thing has a totally different design principle than any other protein."
The only artificial, engineering-like step is where the scientists decide to move the genes from one organism to another. If that’s detectable or not, I dunno--"This enzyme seems to be a trivial modification of an Icelandic hot-spring bacterium’s gene, including all of the translation-invariant choices. What the hell is it doing in wild North American cabbage?". If there is any evidence of Behe seeing, or even looking for, such a thing, I’d love to hear about it.
Horizontal gene transfer might be invoked to explain one or two such oddities. If I were a a future crustacean version of Michael Behe, I might notice a systematic pattern of: lots of "apparent" horizontal-transfer events; all apparently under rapid selection, with sources (apparently) randomly scattered over the world but with targets concentrated in plains and pasture species; all occurring at about the same time ("Just before the late Holocene mass extinction") as the peak of an ill-understood material culture. Weird.
All said, I find nature's ease in recycling humanity's relics a bit depressing. Yes, it's very nice to know that complex life will handily outlast us, at least for another 1.1 billion years, after which point a heating sun is 10% brighter than it is today will make the Earth's oceans start to evaporate into water vapour. Still, the idea that millions of years hence nothing identifiable will be left of my species but piles of civilization's waste and fossil records of a sadly depleted biosphere is depressing. Is a net positive legacy really too much to hope for?
